they have indeed greatly increased staffs and they even have elements in washington that begin to act like lobbies. when a new problem arises, a joint task force is put together. and that makes sense. and the elements may come from more than one of the unified and specified commands. so i think another look is needed at not at the question of jointness, but at how it's carried out. and how the overhead is distributed. >> you worked in the pentagon during the vietnam war and there are those and you even mentioned certain parallels between the vietnam conflict and what we're seeing in afghanistan. right now there's a big debate going on in washington whether or not troop levels should remain high to ensure that we can train the afghans fast enough to hand over control before we leave at the end of 2014. why is that a bad idea from your standpoint? >> the real question is what kind of country is going to -- will it be possible to leave behind? and the case of vietnam, my own conclusion back in period of 1967, '68, became that the government there was unsustainable because it really did n